Over the past couple of weeks I have been making these savory muffins. I could eat them for breakfast. Or with dinner. Heck even for dinner! They are surprisingly simple to make, and I think are sure to impress. I knew I would be excited about them the minute that Simone posted this recipe for this month’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge.
As always, the first obstacle is converting the recipe to gluten free – but being corn meal based, I knew this would not be difficult. I have made gluten free cornbread quite successfully on several occasions, and did not see any reason why these would pose any other difficulty. Since all of the recipes Simone has posted so far list the ingredients by weight, this makes the gluten free home cook’s life much easier to come up with a substitution – as I have been learning over the past year from participating in the gluten free ratio rally, often merely replacing the same weight of conventional flour with gluten free ingredients seems to work rather well. In this case, for the flour component, I used 2/3 rice flour and 1/3 potato starch – I kept the substitutions simple here rather than using a lot of varying ingredients because I knew gluten wasn’t really important in this recipe – it often isn’t in muffins and cakes – and so I didn’t have to worry about replicating all the culinary effects of gluten.
Next came one of my favorite parts of this blog, creating the photo!
I studied the original photo to first see what type of light was used and where it was coming from. To me light is always the most important feature so it’s what I try to figure out first, before anything else. The more I take the time to analyze food photos, the better I am able to glean what type of behind the scenes setup might have been used to create it. In this case, I look at where the shadows and bright spots are – I see a shadow around the lower left of each of the plates, and notice the sheen on the cakes also indicating that the light is coming from slightly back and right, around 2:00. The pepper shaker also gives clues – sometimes it’s easier to look at the shiniest (i.e. most reflective) element in a photo, because it will often giveaway highlights and shadows more obviously. To recreate the image though, I would need a background that was large and light colored – one that wouldn’t take away light and that wouldn’t distract from the food – I have no such background, so decided to manipulate the light slightly differently, by putting fabric over my windows and having the light coming from behind, in a way to replicate that background but still let a lot of light in. By angling the table 45 degrees to the window, I was still able to get a nice sheen on the cakes. A folded white foam core helped soften shadows on the left, and an aluminum tray that I held up reflected more light to the right side.
As for the styling/composition, I kept things fairly similar. A stack of muffins front and center (well, lower center), a plate in the background, a wine glass, and something off to the back left. Lacking pretty white plates like the original photo, I opted for metals ones that I had instead, and lined them with white napkins so that they would still be nice and light. The wine in the original was rather orange and honeyed looking, but not wanting to open up our fancy dessert wines from Piemonte just for a photo (which with a baby on the way I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anyways), I opted for not worrying so much about the color – in fact I lightly brewed green tea and poured that in the wine glass! Since the feature is the muffins, and this is not an ad in any way, I felt I only needed to bring about the feeling of wine and the fact that it was really tea was not so important. And lacking a silver pepper shaker, went with this pewter piece which I could envision being used to maybe spread honey or something on the muffins, and also omitted the napkin behind it. I did add food to the back plate – it just seemed empty without something there.
When it came to the treatment of the photo, I didn’t try to replicate the original at all, but went with what I felt I liked for the image I had created. I always like a bit of color and contrast, and I think that shows in most of the images I create. However what I have started playing with recently is white balance.
[click to continue…]
